Students and Teachers Join the Conversation
Our hope is that when students and teachers view Detroit 48202: Conversations Along a Postal Route they will have many questions and comments to add to a larger conversation about cities, racism, and social movements seeking a more just future.
The activities in the Detroit 48202 Teacher’s Guide invite students into this conversation. In these “galleries” you can explore creative responses submitted by students who have seen Detroit 48202
Postcards To Wendell
On these postcards, students tell Wendell how a particular image or statement in the film is meaningful to them and how the film connects to their lives, or issues in their communities.
Please write your own postcard, scan it or take a photo of it, and email it to share@detroit48202.com.
Community Hand Maps
On these hand maps, students tell their stories about the cities or communities they live in.
Will you map your own city story? Submit it to share@detroit48202.com.
Letters About General Baker’s Legacy of Struggle
In these letters, students share what they have learned from General Baker’s life as a Detroit auto workers and founding member of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement.
If you want to share something you learned from Gen’s story, send it to share@detroit48202.com.
Explore the Issues
Organizations and Museums
Detroit Action Equity Lab
The Detroit Equity Action Lab (DEAL) is an innovative hub for community-driven research, programming and media — raises the profile of racial justice issues, connects community experts to build collective power and amplifies the voices of Detroiters.
Detroit Historical Society – Detroit 67: Perspectives Exhibit
The Detroit Historical Society convened diverse groups and communities around the effects of a historic crisis with its Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward project. The Detroit 67: Perspectives exhibition allows visitors to better understand the events of July 1967, what led up to them, where we are today and how to connect to efforts moving Detroit forward.
InsideOut Literary Arts
As Detroit’s largest and oldest literary non-profit, InsideOut now serves more than 100 classrooms and community sites annually. Our professional writers continue to help students experiment with words and learn that each unique voice matters – https://detroitblackfoodsecurity.org/that there is power in “bringing the inside out.”
Allied Media Projects
Allied Media Projects (AMP) cultivates media for liberation. Our media includes all the ways we communicate with the world. Our liberation is an ongoing process of personal, collective, and systemic transformation. We are a network of people and projects, rooted in Detroit and connected to hundreds of other places across the globe
We The People of Detroit
In 2008, We The People of Detroit (WPD) was founded in response to Emergency Management over the city of Detroit and Detroit Public Schools. As a community-based grassroots organization, WPD aims to inform, educate, and empower Detroit residents on imperative issues surrounding civil rights, land, water, education, and the democratic process.
The Detroit People’s Platform
DPP works for REAL Community Benefit Agreements, advocates and organizes for truly affordable housing and public transit that responds to the needs of Detroiters.
The James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership
The mission of The Boggs Center is to nurture the transformational leadership capacities of individuals and organizations committed to creating productive, sustainable, ecologically responsible, and just communities.
The People’s Water Board Coalition
The People’s Water Board advocates for access, protection, and conservation of water. We believe water is a human right and all people should have access to clean and affordable water.
Detroit Black Food Security Network
DBCFSN works to build self-reliance, food security and justice in Detroit’s Black community by influencing public policy, engaging in urban agriculture, promoting healthy eating, encouraging cooperative buying and directing youth towards careers in food-related fields.
The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History
The Wright Museum houses over 35,000 artifacts and archival materials and is home to the Blanche Coggin Underground Railroad Collection, Harriet Tubman Museum Collection, Coleman A. Young Collection and the Sheffield Collection, a repository of documents of the labor movement in Detroit.
City of Detroit’s Planning and Development Department
The mission of the City of Detroit’s Planning and Development Department is to build a city secure in its future, grounded in its roots and hopeful in its present state. The vision that supports this mission is a healthy and beautiful Detroit, built on inclusionary growth, economic opportunity and an atmosphere of trust.
Books and Articles
Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination
By Herb Boyd
The Origins of the Urban Crisis
By Thomas Sugrue
Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City
By Heather Ann Thompson
By Lolita Hernandez
By David Maraniss
By Georgakas and Surkin
By Arthur L. Johnson
Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit
By June Manning Thomas
By Kevin Boyle
Detroit: Race Riots, Racial Conflict, and Efforts to Bridge the Racial Divide
By Joe T. Darden and Richard W. Thomas
A Black Revolutionary’s Life in Labor
By Mike Hamlin
Edited by Anna Clark
By John Hersey
The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford
By Beth Bates
Detroit Lives: Conflict in Regional and Urban Development
Compiled and Edited by Robert H.Mast
Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town
By Steve Babson
9226 Kercheval: The Storefront that Didn’t Burn
by Nancy Milio
Fiction by Bill Harris:
Booker T. & Them: A Blues, 2012
Birth of a Notion; Or, The Half Ain’t Never Been Told, 2010
By A.J. Verdelle
The Selected Poems of Murray Jackson
Edited by Kathryne Lindberg
by Julie Pincus & Nichole Christian
The Detroit Project: Three Plays
By Dominique Morisseau
Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press
by Melba Joyce Boyd
The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy
by Anna Clark
Websites
Mapping InequalityRedlining in New Deal America
Mapping Inequality, provides interactive tools to grapple with this history of redlining, government policies that directed both public and private capital to native-born white families and away from African American and immigrant families, and contributing to inequality.
Detroitography.com
Detroit Cartography/Geography = DETROITography – we are all about maps and geography of Detroit. We like to write about maps that other people make about the City as well as create our own maps of Detroit.
Undesign the Redline
Undesign the Redline project is an interactive exhibit, workshop series and curriculum that explores the history of structural racism and classism, how these designs compounded each other from 1938 Redlining maps until today, and how WE can come together to undesign these systems with intentionality.